of iron-wood, and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his
acquaintance, flirted in strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas. When
this young man was in the house, she alternately dismissed and
recalled her daughter, and tried to detect symptoms of jealousy in
that youthful soul, so as to have occasion to repress them. She
imitated the police in its dealings with the republicans; but she
labored in vain. Rosalie showed no symptoms of rebellion. Then the
arid bigot accused her daughter of perfect insensibility. Rosalie knew
her mother well enough to be sure that if she had thought young
Monsieur de Soulas _nice_, she would have drawn down on herself a
smart reproof. Thus, to all her mother's incitement she replied merely
by such phrases as are wrongly called Jesuitical--wrongly, because the
Jesuits were strong, and such reservations are the _chevaux de frise_
behind which weakness takes refuge. Then the mother regarded the girl
as a dissembler. If by mischance a spark of the true nature of the
Wattevilles and the Rupts blazed out, the mother armed herself with
the respect due from children to their parents to reduce Rosalie to
passive obedience.

This covert battle was carried on in the most secret seclusion of
domestic life, with closed doors. The Vicar-General, the dear Abbe
Grancey, the friend of the late Archbishop, clever as he was in his
capacity of the chief Father Confessor of the diocese, could not
discover whether the struggle had stirred up some hatred between the
mother and daughter, whether the mother were jealous in anticipation,
or whether the court Amedee was paying to the girl through her mother
had not overstepped its due limits. Being a friend of the family,
neither mother nor daughter, confessed to him. Rosalie, a little too
much harried, morally, about young de Soulas, could not abide him, to
use a homely phrase, and when he spoke to her, trying to take her